Friday, 6 September 2013

PAX, MLP & My Beliefs

I gave up My Little Pony in 2012. It became apparent the show felt the handicapped were either mistakes that needed to be fixed/ignored, or the butt of tasteless jokes. I swore off being a brony. It hurt my soul to do it, because the show brought so much happiness into my life. But some things are more important than my happiness. You can’t stand by cruelty, just because it’s not aimed at you.

The show has only gotten more popular. Nobody else gave it up. Everyone I’ve ever talked to feels the same way about it. I’ve never heard anyone justify the behaviour of Hasbro, The Hub or show runner Jason Thiessen. It’s always: “Yeah, it sucks. It’s totally discriminatory and unfair, but what are you gonna do?”

They say it as if they’re powerless. They justify it by saying that it still makes them happy. That it did a lot of good for them, so it’s okay. That the good it brings to their individual lives somehow outweighs the evil it brought down on an entire group of people.

The testimony of weak people does not impress me. This is also my problem with organized religion. If something you believe in does something monstrous, that doesn’t go away because it gave you a purpose. “So what if the Catholic Church molests children and then defends the attackers? It gets me out of the house, so that makes me a goody good-good!”

If you have to look the other way, you’re not in the presence of something good.

▼

The thing about crappy game companies, comic book companies, children’s show developers and web comics is that they don’t give a fuck what their audiences think. They just want to FEEL right. People would rather convince themselves they’re good people than to do any of the work that title requires.

So if they lose a fan because they insist on supporting or making money off of rape culture, they don’t care. Because they’ll just get a new, shitty fan, who’s probably committed sexual violence in the past to support them. They think they haven’t lost anything, because it’s a numbers game to them. These people don’t care about the quality of the people supporting them. As long as they get money, and as long as they have a stadium of cheering people, they think they’ve done a good job.

And as long as people are surrounded by people clapping and shouting, they never think twice. They never stop to consider if they’re in the right place, supporting the right things or the right people. We have a primal need to be accepted by the tribe. People don’t want to lose that because it’s hard to be alone. Because they’d rather feel good now than right in the long run. We don’t want to give that up because then we’d be unhappy. We’d lose some happiness by having moral standards.

Well I say, fuck happiness! Who the hell says you need to be happy? You are not entitled to happiness, if it comes at the expense of someone else.

As long as we put up with injustice for own selfish desires, as long as we enable and finance the decisions of evil people, women will always be masturbation fantasies in comics. Gay and Trans people will always be beaten and jailed. Asians will always be invisible. Blacks will always be victims. Muslims will always be portrayed as the villains. The handicapped will always be a joke. And rape victims will always be Mike Krahulik’s punchline. It will never “get better”.

If the physically or mentally-challenged are unwelcome in Ponyville, then I am unwelcome. If a rape victim is ridiculed at PAX, then I am ridiculed. If a murdered black boy in Florida does not have justice, then I do not have justice. If a gay or transgender person is assaulted, then I am assaulted. If a woman in Texas does not own her body, then I don’t own mine. If Asians, Mexicans, Muslims, Natives and the homeless are treated as outsiders, then I do not belong. It doesn’t matter that I’m white. If people are not truly free, then neither am I. And neither are you.